Humorously enough, I feel like this site might archive my comment better (although even if it doesn't, I use this site and will appreciate being able to find my comment later), so I'm going to cross-post it here. ;P
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The mechanism for interactive communication has gotten faster, but overall the process hasn't changed in the last two thousand years. The people who study physics today are continuing conversations that were begun long ago thanks to the printing press, by publishing papers that reply to people who are now long dead.
In fact, I think your entire argument could apply to writing of all forms just as easily as it could apply to the Internet: with people saving their knowledge in a form that didn't rely on people to actively remember and store it, the amount of knowledge in the world created by people who are dead should drastically outstrip the amount of knowledge being created by the people who are actually alive.
However, that argument is based on two hidden, and yet flawed, assumptions.
The first is that writing is in some way fundamentally more permanent than memory: that what we write down will last throughout the ages and be available to all of the people later whom might be interested in finding and responding to it, without being damaged or lost or simply unfindable in a giant pile of unindexed information.
Frankly, from my perspective, (and seriously: this is nothing personal to you), the probability that your website is going to survive for the long haul and that people will be responding to this comment thread two generations from now is nearly zero. I'd actually be quite surprised if your website and all of the comments that are on it are still here in just another ten years.
In fact, in another ten years the entire medium may have changed. The information placed on the Internet just thirty years ago to Usenet has now already mostly been lost, with the information from twenty years ago seemingly being deleted by Google. Websites from the Geocities and AOL era of ten years ago are now a distant memory of archive.org, and that's assuming it got to them at all.
In practice, the things that we are saying here are not /fundamentally/ less transient than they have been in previous eras: it will last for some dwindling amount of time, and unless I say something interesting enough here to cause them to rephrase it, to rework it, to keep it alive for the next generation, this conversation will end. But however I think about it, I doubt that my specific words will be what survives.
The second assumption is that the number of people remain constant. Putting aside for a second the possibility that this entire experiment we call civilization may come crumbling around us in a catastrophic war for water and oil (if nothing else, because that is likely to destroy the Internet and with it the premise of the argument), the number of people on earth is currently doubling every 35 years, a rate that has actually been accelerating (although maybe our counts of people have just been becoming more accurate ;P).
Assuming the amount of information someone can produce is constant (which is a conservative assumption, given that new technology may in fact be allowing us to be more prolific over time), if the population doubles every X years then the amount of work created during any given X years will be equal to one more unit of work than the total amount of work ever created before that time period.
(This is easily demonstrated, in case anyone visiting this site and reading this doesn't believe that, by taking a single person during the first time period creating a single unit of work. During the second time period, two units of work are created, which is one more than during the first. When we get to the third time period we are now creating four units of work, which is one more than one plus two. The pattern works just like the digits of a binary number: adding a number of powers of two together and adding one gets the next power of two.)
Therefore, not only does old conversation tend to decay faster than we'd hope, but it actually would rapidly become swamped by new conversation even if it were perfectly permanent and never rotted or was damaged in any way.
(It also should be pointed out, by the way, that the average mortality rate is heavily dominated by "old people", a demographic that is unlikely to be reading your blog, so in fact the likelihood that many of the people who have read this, or any other, post on your website is much smaller than .8%. You need not be concerned about the massive dead body count associated with your viewership, at least for another couple decades.)
That all said, I will say that I was incredibly happy that I didn't notice that you wrote this over two years ago until I was nearly done typing this comment. ;P That part was certainly epic: I found this article from a link on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106515).
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The mechanism for interactive communication has gotten faster, but overall the process hasn't changed in the last two thousand years. The people who study physics today are continuing conversations that were begun long ago thanks to the printing press, by publishing papers that reply to people who are now long dead.
In fact, I think your entire argument could apply to writing of all forms just as easily as it could apply to the Internet: with people saving their knowledge in a form that didn't rely on people to actively remember and store it, the amount of knowledge in the world created by people who are dead should drastically outstrip the amount of knowledge being created by the people who are actually alive.
However, that argument is based on two hidden, and yet flawed, assumptions.
The first is that writing is in some way fundamentally more permanent than memory: that what we write down will last throughout the ages and be available to all of the people later whom might be interested in finding and responding to it, without being damaged or lost or simply unfindable in a giant pile of unindexed information.
Frankly, from my perspective, (and seriously: this is nothing personal to you), the probability that your website is going to survive for the long haul and that people will be responding to this comment thread two generations from now is nearly zero. I'd actually be quite surprised if your website and all of the comments that are on it are still here in just another ten years.
In fact, in another ten years the entire medium may have changed. The information placed on the Internet just thirty years ago to Usenet has now already mostly been lost, with the information from twenty years ago seemingly being deleted by Google. Websites from the Geocities and AOL era of ten years ago are now a distant memory of archive.org, and that's assuming it got to them at all.
In practice, the things that we are saying here are not /fundamentally/ less transient than they have been in previous eras: it will last for some dwindling amount of time, and unless I say something interesting enough here to cause them to rephrase it, to rework it, to keep it alive for the next generation, this conversation will end. But however I think about it, I doubt that my specific words will be what survives.
The second assumption is that the number of people remain constant. Putting aside for a second the possibility that this entire experiment we call civilization may come crumbling around us in a catastrophic war for water and oil (if nothing else, because that is likely to destroy the Internet and with it the premise of the argument), the number of people on earth is currently doubling every 35 years, a rate that has actually been accelerating (although maybe our counts of people have just been becoming more accurate ;P).
Assuming the amount of information someone can produce is constant (which is a conservative assumption, given that new technology may in fact be allowing us to be more prolific over time), if the population doubles every X years then the amount of work created during any given X years will be equal to one more unit of work than the total amount of work ever created before that time period.
(This is easily demonstrated, in case anyone visiting this site and reading this doesn't believe that, by taking a single person during the first time period creating a single unit of work. During the second time period, two units of work are created, which is one more than during the first. When we get to the third time period we are now creating four units of work, which is one more than one plus two. The pattern works just like the digits of a binary number: adding a number of powers of two together and adding one gets the next power of two.)
Therefore, not only does old conversation tend to decay faster than we'd hope, but it actually would rapidly become swamped by new conversation even if it were perfectly permanent and never rotted or was damaged in any way.
(It also should be pointed out, by the way, that the average mortality rate is heavily dominated by "old people", a demographic that is unlikely to be reading your blog, so in fact the likelihood that many of the people who have read this, or any other, post on your website is much smaller than .8%. You need not be concerned about the massive dead body count associated with your viewership, at least for another couple decades.)
That all said, I will say that I was incredibly happy that I didn't notice that you wrote this over two years ago until I was nearly done typing this comment. ;P That part was certainly epic: I found this article from a link on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106515).